This comes up from time to time, usually in other threads, and often derails them, so I thought I'd give it its own thread.
Why Quality is Important:
Presumably quality is primarily important because a higher quality game will be more fun than a lower quality one. In Internet fora, quality is important because it gets used to judge games and to argue that Game X is somehow better than D20 since it's "higher quality."
I also see quality designations being used to judge gamers who play low quality games.
ISO and Quality:
The International Standards Organization defines quality as "conformance to requirements" -- this works for manufacturing and software development where requirements are explicit and fairly objective.
I think the idea of a requirements specification for an RPG is an intriguing one, but most people who invoke this only pay lip-service to the idea; I have yet to see a real requirements specification for a table-top RPG.
So for the purposes of this thread, we're talking about some other kind of quality measurement -- more of an artistic judgment, I expect (Although if anyone has another model, I'm interested).
What I'm looking for:
I'm looking for anyone who thinks they can identify a game of refined quality and especially interested in the criteria they use to make that judgment.
My Hypothesis:
I don't think artistic judgments of games are valid in anything beyond a personal sense -- in other words, if you think your game is "higher quality" than D&D in some objective way I think you're fooling yourself.
Note for clarity: Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and they're entitled to say it proud and loud. I've got no issue with anyone saying, "I hate Game X." I just don't think it's valid to say "Game X is better than Game Y in an artistic sense."
Why on earth would I think that when it's obvious that we (I mean humanity) judge entertainment all the time and find say, The Sopranos to be of higher quality than [insert average show]?
And, while I'm questioning myself, I'm aware that we do the make judgments about food and drink and art, so why not games?
Here's my reasoning: For a criticism to be valid beyond just being a personal opinion it needs to be informed by cultural norms and standards. That, in turn, requires a history of criticism and a sorting process with identifiable landmarks to judge against (A "canon")
Those things don't exist for games (yet) and may never exist for rules-sets, period. For other things we judge (food, film, books, music) they've existed for decades (film) if not centuries (everything else on the list).
In the case of other media we not only a history of criticism and canon, we also have time: we know that Shakespeare turned out to be good stuff since it's been around for a long time and people still like it.
For relatively new forms of entertainment (I count RPGs and computer games) we don't have much perspective (although we know that D&D has lasted in some form or another for about 30 years) and we lack anything like a respected body of criticism.
What we have no lack of is opinion -- everyone's got one, as the saying goes. On the Internet, they're all equally valid (after all, if *I* can post here, they'll clearly let *anyone* in, right?)
I think most people think some opinions (theirs) are "more equal" than others (often, it seems, mine) -- and maybe this is true (I've been accused of bad taste before) but I think everyone knows someone who thinks their opinion about what's good or bad is in some way objective fact; that person thinks it's all so clear. Everyone else thinks he's pretentious (if you are that person... trust me on this).
The exception would someone who gets paid or otherwise recognized to provide his opinion (if you're a paid movie reviewer or a highly-sought wine critic, for example) -- but plenty of people think their opinion is worth paying for, even when there's no evidence that's the case.
That's what I think is going on in the vast majority of on-line game judgment. I'd be interested to find out where I'm wrong (that is: where the necessary rigor and cultural consistency is developing a canon of games and a culture of respectable criticism).
That's what this thread is about.
So:
If you think some games are better than others and you can tell the difference, I'd like to hear what your criteria is and why your perspective is one worth paying for.
Also, if you *do* get paid to review RPG's for a reasonable publication, I'd like to know (and maybe I want in on that action!)
Couple of final notes:
I think some games are more or less objectively broken -- I'm talking about games so poorly written that they're hard to figure out how to play, or games where the mechanics seem to give extreme outcomes that don't match player expectations. I *do* think it's possible to judge these mechanically and not artistically, but I'm a little unclear on exactly how to do so (And one person's "mechanically broken" might be another person's "brilliant mechanic" so maybe we're back to square one).
Also: games with offensive subject material (e.g. racist games) are out-of-scope. Clearly a game can be vile without any reference to game quality. I'm only interested, in this thread, in looking at games that aren't repulsive because of their content.
Cheers,
-E.